1. Field of the Invention
An object of the present invention is a system for controlling a robot. It concerns, more particularly, robots for which the control is of the electronic type. The use of robots of this type is becoming widespread, especially for the handling of articles stored in warehouses. The invention is essentially aimed at making it easier for personnel, in principle unskilled, to manage and use robots of this type.
2. Description of the Prior Art
There are, for example, known handling robots which have the task of taking objects from a store, conveying them and putting them down at another place where they are designed to be taken up for distribution to a consignee or customer. There are two types of automated installations to control these robots. In a first type of installation, the warehouse is laid out so that electrical wires are embedded in the positions through which the robot passes. These wires are designed to supply power this robot as well as to control it. The drawback of installations of this type is that they are not flexible: they cannot be easily modified or complemented and, moreover, they are costly. For, they call for a major infrastructure in the warehouses. This infrastructure is far more demanding than the mere setting up of smooth surfaces on the ground of the warehouse to enable the robots to move about. In another, more flexible, type of installation, the robots are remote controlled by electromagnetic waves. While this latter type of installation is less costly, it has numerous disadvantages: essentially, the electromagnetic waves cannot be propagated efficiently in every industrial environment. It is not certain that the performance instructions to the robots will be transmitted.
Irrespective of the system for transmitting instructions to the robot, another problem appears. This problem relates to the qualifications of the workmen entrusted with managing the robots. With some of them, these qualifications are inadequate. In practice, these workmen are not capable of dictating the instructions to be carried out by the robots, even in a highly developed computer language. The result of this is that the workmen assigned to tasks of this type should be more qualified. This entails greater wage costs.
Furthermore, if there is an automatic installation designed to handle several robots, it becomes necessary to perfect the definition of a complicated system to manage all these robots. This definition takes a great deal of time. Of itself, it necessitates the centralization of the control of the robots and, to an even greater extent, it warrants the appointment of qualified workment to manage operations which are not very complicated in themselves and could normally be performed by handlers. The subsequent modification of this complicated system is itself a complicated process. Choosing a centralized management mode of this type ultimately implies the choice of a system whose development will always be hindered by its specific character.
An object of the invention is to cope with these drawbacks by proposing a robot controlling system with a universal character, wherein the robots come and get served by an automatic distributor. From this distributor, they take up electronic cards, called chip cards, having a memorized program of instructions to be carried out by this robot. Then, the handlers' task is simply, depending on the job commands to be carried out, to stack, in the distributor, those memory electronic cards corresponding to the chronology of these commands. To make their task easier, these memory cards, which are substantially flat, have a location on one their faces, designed to receive understandable indications. These indications may, if necessary, symbolically represent the program to be carried out. The recording of the programs in the chip cards simplifies the handlers' work. The reading of the instruction programs contained in these cards, by a card reader carried by the robot, then provides for the simple transmission of the instructions to be carried out. For its movements, the robot may then make use of markers placed in its path.